Top PPC Optimization Tips for Ecommerce Businesses

Pay-per-click marketing or PPC as we know it, has changed the way ecommerce businesses carry out promotional campaigns. Much credits to PPC, the marketing in ecommerce industry revolves around millions of keywords and thousands of ad campaigns.

According to statistics on nChannel, around 96% of Americans have made online purchases at least once in their life. This figure goes on to indicate the trend of online shopping among consumers of all ages.

Looking at ecommerce from marketing perspective, a major part of it is about driving clicks and engagement to product using various promotional strategies including PPC. It wouldn’t be wrong to state that PPC marketing is, perhaps, one of the most trusted ways to increase a brand’s presence and engagement rates.

Businesses that optimize PPC marketing campaigns are more likely to enjoy greater market exposure. In this regard, we have compiled a few PPC optimization tips that you can follow to upscale the marketing strategy of your ecommerce store.

Exclude Underperforming Keywords

Identifying underperforming keywords and halting their use is the very first step towards optimizing a PPC campaign. Now, even though engagement and click-through-rate (CTR) are critically important to a promotional campaign, the ultimate goal of a marketing strategy is to produce sales.

Use Negative Keywords

Including negative keywords is one of the best practices to avoid showing your ad to the relevant audience. You ought to keep a close watch on your Search terms report to effectively use negative keywords in your ad campaign. Keep that in mind that negative keywords should relate to your product, service or industry.

This practice won’t only save your ad’s cost per view, but it will also help you identify relevant audience for your ad campaigns. Moreover, the inclusion of negative keywords increases engagement rate and CTR of an ad campaign.

Include Long Tail Keywords

Long tail keywords are specific to search results and they are looked up by customers who are mostly likely to buy a product that they are searching for.

Considering an ecommerce store, targeting long tail keywords means you are targeting consumers who have already made a buying decision.

Long tail keywords tend to fetch better search engine rankings that will drive traffic, engagement and clicks on your ad campaign as well as web store, eventually resulting in better reach and sales.

Include Pricing in Ad Copy

An Ad copy is tailormade to invoke questions among target audience, as to why they should buy a certain product or service. More importantly, putting up prices on ad copies is a striking factor when it comes to closing a deal.

Ad copies with visible prices have a higher chance of catching attention and the reason is pretty simple. Customers are more likely to make a buying decision for products that display prices wide out on the ad copy.

Additionally, including prices in the ad copy helps filter out customers who cannot afford the product. This will reduce the ad cost since you’d only be targeting the right audience.

Use Demographic Targeting

Demographic targeting enables you to target the audience you are looking for. Considering that your web store sells Fidget Spinners (currently trending) then your ad should target people between age 16–30, since the product is popular among them.

With demographic targeting, you also have a choice to target a particular gender. Opting for this method helps your ad reach out to males, females, or both of them.

Optimizing PPC ad campaign with demographic targeting will not only help you receive valuable response for your ad campaign, but it will also fetch leads from your desired gender and age group.

Eye on Geographic Targeting

A web store has a lot of products to offer and it’s not necessary that every location fits perfect for your ad campaign. It is best advised to not pursue locations that have already resulted dead in terms of conversion and click rate, unless a miraculous trend has occurred in that region during recent past.

For instance, if you run a web store that sells Australian souvenirs, your ad should be widely available in Australian regions rather than other countries.

Keep an Eye on Competitors

Running an ecommerce store isn’t a piece of cake and you have to keep up with the rapidly changing trends to stay in the race. A common practice to rank your PPC marketing campaign at the top, is to stay updated with the latest happenings of your competition.

An Auction insight report includes some of the most important metrics such as impression share, Ad position, Overlap rate, Position above rate, top of page percent, etc.

Using Auction Insight Report won’t only give you a competitor’s edge, but it will also help you keep a close watch on your competitors’ PPC marketing strategies..

Set Up Ecommerce Tracking

Adding Google Analytics ecommerce tracking equips you with all the essential data about your ecommerce store. You can keep a close eye on traffic sources, returning visitors, conversion rates, targeted keywords and their performance, landing page metrics, etc.

Make Your Way to the Top

Optimizing your PPC Ad campaign isn’t too bit of a hassle if you use the right marketing tactics. Try implementing the aforementioned tips and let us know how it works out for you. Take a good note of differences between the past and upcoming campaigns after including these tricks in your PPC marketing strategy.

That’s all for now. What’s your take on our tips to optimize PPC marketing? Do let us know in comments.

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About Tahha Ashraf

Tahha Ashraf is a Digital Content Producer at Cloudways, a Managed Cloud Hosting Platform. He loves talking about brands and writes content related to online marketing. He is fond of creativity and writes poetry in his free time.